Things have been quite here lately and that’s mostly due to me being very busy and trying to get some projects off the ground.

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Things have been pretty quite around here lately. I took 2 weeks of vacation in September and have had a lot on my plate and unfortunatly Geek Daily has suffered as I haven’t had the time to post new articles.

Things will be turning around in the near future though. I have some exciting things coming up that I think you guys will enjoy.

I have partnered with TradePub to offer free magazines and ebooks on software and other technology topics. This should be available in the very near future.

I am writing a guest post for Dev102 that I hope will be finished and published soon. I will keep you updated on this.

Finally I am reviewing a book for Packt Publishing again. This time I am reviewing a book on Object Orient Programming with PHP5. Expect to see my review in the coming weeks.

You might want to grab the RSS feed if you haven’t already. It is going to be an exciting month.

If you haven’t heard by now Google has annouce Google Chrome. Chrome is a new browser from Google that is based on WebKit and includes a lot of exciting new features and looks to push web standards to the fore front were they can’t be ignored any longer. Check out the comic book that explains Chrome.

On the other hand, early test of IE8 beta 2 don’t look so promising. According to InfoWorld IE8 consumes a whopping 400MB of RAM and executes upto 200 concurrent threads. In short, it uses more resources than Windows XP..yes I mean the OS!!!

Here is a few stories of interest from around the Internet today.

Red Hat, Fedora Servers Compromised
“In an email sent to the fedora-announce mailing list, it has been revealed that both Fedora and Red Hat servers have been compromised. As a result Fedora is changing their package signing key. Red Hat has released a security advisory and a script to detect potentially compromised openssh packages.”

Mootools Bomberman
Munteanu Gabriel has produced a Bomberman clone using the Mootools javascript library.

Microsoft Hires Jerry Seinfeld
In a marketing ploy to turn Vistas bad reputation MS has brought Jerry Seinfeld on board in it’s $300 million PR blitz. Personally, I think the money would be better spent on development and actually fixing Vista instead of trying to convince people that it’s not so bad.

We all love to hate Sony. In fact, I could make a full time job out of hating Sony and still work overtime. Instead of ranting about some of the reasons I think Techcult did a fine job of it here.

One of the things that really bugs me the most is how Sony crippled the PSP so it could not output to an external screen, like say your TV. So you had these PSP movies that you had to watch on a tiny screen instead of hooking up to your 46 inch flat screen. Thanks Sony. Not a good selling point.

Well, the Zune must have realized what idiots Sony were and decided to do the opposite and include TV out capabilities. You can watch your Zune content on your TV which is nice because seriously who wants to watch movies on a tiny screen especially if you want to show someone else? This may require some extra Zune accessories like a Zune AV cable but that is pretty common.

Another nice feature of the Zune is the ability to stream video and audio to your XBox. Sony could have easily done the same with the Play Station but nope, why would anybody want to do that? It amazes me that Sony is still in business.

On top of it all the Zune has a battery life up to 30 hours. This beats my old iPod by a long shot. Another nice feature of the Zune is the Zune charger. You can plug Zune into a standard powere outlet to charge and not have to plug into your computers USB ports, although that is an option if you want. This bugs me about my iPod I have to plug it into my PC and must have iTunes installed on the computer to charge the device. Not exactly convenient on the road sinceI don’t have a laptop to bring along to charge it.

The Zune seems to take some flack as a second rate player but I like the feature I have described and it easily beats the pants off PSP for any media content. Whether you’ll like if over iPod is matter of preference.

I am always interested in the latest toys coming from cell phone makers. Cell phones can do so much these days besides make phone calls. You can play mp3s, take pictures, make videos, or surf the Web.

Cell phones have become such an integrated part of our lives it is impossible to imagine living without them. Just simple stuff like texting a friend, even if they are in the same house, yes I know you guys do that :D, has become just a way of life.

Apart from regular use they are critical to business and the slightest time savings when making a deal can save money or even mean the difference of getting or missing out on an opportunity. Our busy lives require cell phones.

Just like the vast array of phones and features, price varies just as much. So how do you know what cell phone is better than the other? How can you easily compare feature? Cell phones change so rapidly and there are so many different models out there it is difficult to make a decision especially if you are looking to save some money as well.

I discovered a nice site this weekend that helps me this that very question. PhoneGladiator.com lists all of the latest models with lots of details on features for each phone as well as where to buy them.

There are even consumer reviews and various photos and videos about each phone.

This site can easily save you time when trying to decide to buy a cell phone or determining if it is worth while to just hold onto your current phone.

In, not that surprising, news, it seems GoDaddy employees are allowed to bid in the companies TDNAM auctions. In fact VP Adam Dicker has bought a number of domains with the service.

Why is this wrong? Employees, especially ones like Dicker, have access to inside information like what domains are on user’s wishlists and their bid reserve amounts. This makes it easy for employees to inflate domain prices if they know it is in demand.

According to an article on Domain Name Wire, GoDaddy freely admits that it does not prevent it’s employees from participating as the other big name auctions do.

When will people wake up and realize there are other options to GoDaddy and that the extra $1-$2 you save is not worth this insanity!

I usually don’t participate in contests. That’s probably due to the fact that I am essentially lazy and I have the mind set that I couldn’t possibly win.

Well, I am shrugging that off after seeing Alan’s, of Affiliate Confession, sweet new MacBook Air that he won in a contest.

Alan is throwing a contest of his own with some pretty nice prizes from Market Leverage and Vat19. These prizes include a Nintendo DS iwth 2 games, a Flip Mino camera, a USB missle launcher for harassing your co-workers, and a banana bunker (a plastic shell to protect bananas).

Now it is easy to enter, which is probably why even I am doing it. You just write a blog post, kind of like this one, about the contest. Make sure you link to the contest post, Market Leverage, and Vat19 then leave a comment on the contest post with a link to your blog post about the contest. It’s that easy.

It seems I was a bit forgetful on Friday and forgot to post my roundup. Here is what I liked last week.

The future of .Net, Visual Studio, and more
As the information has been quite minimal, I decided to find out what kind of job postings Microsoft has listed at the moment as they reveal something of what they are planning at the Redmond. As it turns out, there are lot’s of interesting things coming in the future versions of .NET Framework, Visual Studio, SQL Server and SharePoint.

It should be noted that the information in this post is based mostly on combination of several job listings and speculations and it shouldn’t be taken as a definite road map or truth. Projects can be combined, canceled and delayed. I’ll link to the original job posting sources, but I’m not sure how long the links will work.

What is the future of C# anyways?
It was often asked during some of my presentations on F# and Functional C# about the future direction of C# and where I think it’s going. Last night I was pinged about this with my F# talk at the Philly ALT.NET meeting. The question was asked, why bother learning F#, when eventually I’ll get these things for free once they steal it and bring it to C#. Being the language geek that I am, I’m pretty interested in this question as well. Right now, the language itself keeps evolving at a rather quick pace as compared to C++ and Java. And we have many developers that are struggling to keep up with the evolution of the language to a more functional style with LINQ, lambda expressions, lazy evaluation, etc. There are plenty of places to go with the language and a few questions to ask along the way.

Something is wrong on the Internet
That comic sums up the internet in one sentence: the scrum of jostling opinions on the web and the optimism that truth can still win out. I was reminded of that comic when someone asked me about a particular way that someone recently tried to get links. Jonathan Crossfield wrote up a good background summary of the situation.

ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Release
This morning we released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework. I blogged details last month about an interim source release we did that included many of the changes with this Preview 3 release. Today’s build includes some additional features not in last month’s drop, some nice enhancements/refinements, as well as Visual Studio tool integration and documentation.

It always feels nice when you see a decision pay off in a positive way. For me this is especially nice as I seem to find things out the hard way most of the time.

In this case I am referring to a hosting provider I decided NOT to choose. That host is DreamHost. I had done a lot of research on DreamHost and was sure I would go with them when the time can except for chance stumble upon a blog post describing many performance and uptime problems the blogger had experienced with DreamHost. After some debating with myself I decided to look for a different host. That’s how I found HostGator which I am very pleased with thus far.

So on to the point. DreamHost announced via their offical blog that they are encouraging their customers to use GMail instead of the email provided by DreamHost with the customer’s hosting package. Why? According to DreamHost:

Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into “simple” old email.

And that’s kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features.

They want to offload their customer service problems to Google and apparently nobody cares about email when choosing a host. Well, perhaps, that’s because when we choose to pay you for an advertised service we except it to just work and be rock solid. I am not going to contact your sales department and ask for email stats and uptime charts. I expect that it is the best it can possible be.

On the positive side Google probably provides a much more reliable service than DreamHost and Google does it for free. You can even use you@yourdomain.com if you use Google Apps (also free).

I am just glad I stayed clear of DreamHost. What service will they try and drop next?

As a side note I was very surprised at the tone of their blog. It is incredibly unprofessional and I would expect it was written by a nerdy high school student. Here are some quotes.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for late night orgies in the data center.

Me + Web Browser = Instant Orgy (tool tip on image of woman wearing a Firefox tank)

see you emo fags later - tom

To me this is a huge warning sign as to the way the company is run. There is no way I would ever even consider using DreamHost again.